UFO Components
Alien UFO's will contain a variety of components, larger and more powerful UFO's will contain more useful and greater quantity's of components. Components Light Engine The Light Engine is a standard UFO component found on all smaller to mid range craft. It's explosive and will explode if damaged enough times, it has no alenium and a small amount of alien alloys. Beam Weapon The Beam Weapon is an extremely common UFO component that is found on all UFOs, functioning as the craft's beam weapon. It yields just one piece of alien alloys and are not explosive. Alenium Torpedo Alenium Torpedoes are commonly found on almost every UFO and are a source of Alenium making them fairly valuable, they are also explosive. Heavy Engine The Heavy Engine is found on the more substantial alien crafts such as the Cruiser, Landing Ship, Carrier and Battleship. It is a major source of Alien Alloys and some Alenium. UFO Power Source The UFO Power source is an early power source for small to medium sized UFOs ranging from the Scout to the Corvette before its replaced by more heavy duty power sources. It is valuable and each is worth $8,000, along with having some recoverable alenium and alien alloys. It also is fairly explosive. The UFO power source was a crucial research item, before changes were made to the tech tree. Previously it needed to be researched before Alenium could be researched, currently recovering a power source directly leads to Alenium without a prerequisite research. It's former xenopedia entry: Despite only being the size of a household fridge, the power unit recovered from the UFO still produces enough energy to power a city the size of New York. Surprisingly, however, the device proved utterly inert once switched off - not even appearing to radiate heat. The construction of the device is equally peculiar. It consists of a cylindrical outer casing of alien ceramics, the interior of which is dotted with hundreds of tiny laser emitters. Sitting inside this is a rotating inner casing that is packed with a lattice of unidentified yellow crystal, again cylindrical in shape. The origin and composition of these crystals has yet to be determined, but there is no question that they form the heart of the reactor. For want of a better name, my team have dubbed the material "Alenium" and are in the process of removing the lattice from the casing to allow further study. Preliminary scans suggest that there is an almost incomprehensible amount of energy stored within these Alenium crystals, despite the lattice being no larger than a football. This material is potentially one of the greatest discoveries of recent times; we should begin research on it immediately. The rest of the power source contains little of interest. All of the materials used in its construction have been encountered in larger quantities elsewhere in the hulls of recovered UFOs and the machinery itself is not overly complex; studying it has yielded nothing worth commenting upon. The only mystery surrounds the sea of identical laser emitters covering the interior of the outer coating - we are as yet unaware of their purpose. Studying a couple of examples have provided only minor advances in our understanding of laser technology, mostly in the areas of beam focusing and miniaturisation of optical amplifiers. I very much doubt that the aliens are unable to produce far more powerful laser emitters, suggesting that they have deliberately been designed to only emit low intensity beams. We would be interested to know the significance of this with regards to the Alenium lattice; it may give us an avenue of research when we begin to study it. Finally, I understand you have received a request (from personnel in a department which will remain nameless) seeking to prevent me from dismantling such devices inside the base in future. I must object to the repeated usage of the phrase "reckless disregard" and I can assure you I am no more keen to end my life in an enormous fireball than anyone else in this base. I therefore request you tell the staff concerned to stick to what they know (i.e. building things, making unintelligible grunting noises)... Alien Reactor The Alien Reactor is a mid-tier power source found in Cruisers and Landing Ships. It is valuable each one being worth $8,000 and is a source of alenium and alien alloys. Much like all power sources its also explosive. Recovery of a Reactor is a crucial research for plasma and late game technology. Xenopedia entry: The alien Reactor is the size of a small car, consisting of a horizontal cylinder mounted in a curved shell of alien alloys. Despite some visual similarities with the UFO Power Source, the Reactor is a far more intricate creation and generates nearly ten times more energy than its smaller cousin. It does this using exactly the same Alenium core as the Power Source, without any extra method of power generation. The Reactor is actually more efficient at harvesting the energy already being emitted - it seems that the Power Source represents the simplest method of utilising Alenium, easy to construct but not particularly space-efficient. The alien Reactor is used in situations where extra power is needed, but scaling the Power Source up by a factor of ten would not be viable. The utility becomes obvious when you remember that drag increases exponentially with size and observe that enemy capital ships are getting larger and faster. The Reactor is able to capture all this additional energy by harnessing the power of gamma rays. The breakdown of chemical bonds in Alenium seems to release a burst of gamma radiation in addition to the heat that fuels our current reactors. This gamma burst is incredibly energetic but also extremely focused (an unfocused burst of this magnitude would be extremely dangerous) and angled towards six narrow cylindrical tubes of a superdense alien alloy that radiate out from the core like the spokes on a bicycle wheel. This material absorbs the gamma radiation and is rapidly heated by the bombardment of high-energy particles, generating an immense amount of extra useful energy in the form of heat. Overall, it is a simple but effective design, and one I see no major difficulty in replicating in our own technology. Alien Hyperdrive The Hyperdrive is a key component found on Carriers and Battleships, that enables them to do FTL travel. It is not explosive and has no recoverable alienium or alien alloys but is worth $12,000 each. Before the streamlining of the tech tree, it was a required research item for the 'hyperdrive disruptor' that was required to launch Operation Endgame. Xenopedia entry: The alien Hyperdrive is the extraterrestrial faster-than-light drive, allowing their vessels to "jump" distances in a few days that would ordinarily take thousands of years to traverse. It is a gateway to another dimension of the multiverse ("hyperspace"), which is of equivalent size but has rather different set of laws to our own. The Hyperdrive is a large cylinder roughly 5 metres long and 1.5 metres wide. A plasma-filled tube runs the full length of the device, suspended within four rotating electromagnetic rings. The power requirements of the device mean we have only been able to test it on microscopic objects (sadly none of your engineers were willing to donate their brain), but I believe I have discovered how it works. The electromagnets and the plasma tube together generate a magnetic field around the target, which acts as a "tunnel" between two linked points in hyperspace. In effect, the target is occupying two different locations at once - both of which are in another dimension. Once this hyperspace "tunnel" has been created, the device disengages. The target is promptly returned to our own dimension, but cannot simultaneously exist in two places at once so is forced to occupy only one. Crucially, it appears the device somehow ensures that the destination point is always chosen over the origin point. Objects can therefore be transported almost unlimited distances with ease, although increased distance between the destination and origin does lead to increased power consumption. I do not know how this hyperspace gateway is opened, nor explain the dramatically different laws of physics at work there - that work can be done once the war is over. All we need to know is that this device works, and that we must find a way to disable it. Alien Anti-gravity generator The Antigravity generator is a valuable mid-game component found on the larger UFOs starting with Cruisers. It's not explosive and each one recovered is quite valuable at $16,000. It is a crucial research needed for both the Hyperion and the Sentinel armor. Xenopedia entry: The largest alien vessels we encounter cruising through our skies must weigh so much that we simply could not understand how they could stay airborne using only their thrusters. This Anti-Gravity Generator reveals the brilliant solution: create a device that reduces the weight of the ship. A simple explanation - weight is the force acting on an object due to gravity. This device creates a localised field that negates any gravitational pull acting on objects within the field, leaving them otherwise unaffected (and their mass unchanged) but reducing their weight enormously. This allows a UFO to fly using only a fraction of the thrust that would otherwise be needed / could plausibly be generated - indeed, any capital ship that suffered a field malfunction in our atmosphere would meet a rather abrupt end. The function of the device revolves around gravitons, which are the force carriers for gravity in much the same way that photons are the force carriers for electromagnetic radiation (such as light). This device emits a stream of anti-gravitons that pair up with gravitons in the nearby area, annihilating one another in a process that reduces the gravitation force acting on the area. This device can annihilate over ninety percent of the nearby gravitons, leading to a corresponding ninety percent drop in the weight of anything inside the field. It should be easy enough to replicate the technology and use it in our own designs; I have no doubt that it will prove to be a very useful discovery. Alien Fusion Reactor The Alien Fusion Reactor is late game power source for the larger UFOs, primarily powering the Battleship and Carrier. It is explosive and has a large amount of recoverable alenium and alien alloys, along with each recovered unit being worth $10,000. Recovery and research is required to discover Fusion Explosives, the last tier of explosives in grenades and warheads. Xenopedia entry: The Alien Fusion Reactor is a large circular construction used to power the larger extraterrestrial capital ships. It consists of a central Alenium core and a toroidal outer ring that produces a powerful magnetic field to contain the fusion reaction and the 2.2 billion Celsius temperatures that accompany it. The reactor is not actually fuelled directly by Alenium. The Alenium is used to power the energy fields needed to smash together deuterium (a hydrogen isotope) nuclei and generate fusion, a process that itself emits a vast amount of energy - the Alenium just acts as a "starter motor" for the process. As deuterium is freely available and not required in large quantities, this allows a weight of Alenium to release vastly more energy than it itself contains. The limiting factor is the intricacy of the design - the Fusion Reactor is much more advanced and would take far longer to build than a pure-Alenium reactor. It is therefore ideal for larger alien vessels, which have vast power demands but are sufficiently important to warrant use of such a valuable device. We have built a miniaturised fusion reactor in our laboratory using techniques learned from studying the alien design. Shrinking the reactor has caused some loss of efficiency, but relative to its size (no larger than a car engine) it generates at least twenty times more power than anything previously built - it actually puts out almost as much energy as our base reactor. In any case, the ability to obtain vastly increased amounts of power from our existing energy stores is likely to lead to further technological advance. Alien Singularity Core explosive, found in battleships. Xenopedia Entry: This is it, Commander - the power source that underpins the entire extraterrestrial empire. A naked singularity captured in a delicate particle field, streaming raw energy in monumental quantities. The ball of energy at the core of the device is less than a foot wide and could power our entire civilisation for decades. The singularity within the device appears to forever exist on the point of collapse, stabilised by the particle field around it. It is a naked singularity, what I believe is the final state of a black hole - a final explosion that releases all of the energy accumulated by the black hole across its lifetime. The extraterrestrials must have found a method of "capturing" black holes and artificially inducing this explosive state. Once this has been done, the particle field is used to "freeze" the singularity mid-explosion. This forms an elegant closed system. The particle field captures the vast quantities of energy emitted by the singularity, siphoning off a small amount to maintain the field and feeding the excess back into the singularity (which promptly re-emits it). The enormous amount of power flowing endlessly through the loop can then be tapped as required by anything connected to the Singularity Core. As each singularity contains a finite supply of energy, the energy flowing through the circuit will eventually fall to zero - at which point both the particle field and singularity collapse and disappear entirely. The Singularity Core represents the solution to every power consumption issue we have ever had. Alenium reactors can only be miniaturised so far, but the Singularity Core provides almost limitless amounts of power and the containment field can be made small enough to fit inside virtually anything we can dream up. Only one complication - as we obviously do not possess the capacity to harvest singularities ourselves, we will need to capture these devices from the extraterrestrials if we want to use them. Alien Communication Array Found only in alien bases. Xenopedia Entry: Whether they be within a few kilometers of one another or on opposite sides of the solar system, alien craft employ radio signals to communicate with one another. Their long-range transmissions are compressed to a remarkable degree - only a few fleeting nanoseconds of signal can carry all the data the aliens need. The short duration of these transmissions makes it extremely difficult to capture any fleet-level alien communications, but the sheer quantity of radio receivers on our planet means that a few examples have been recorded purely by chance. There are literally thousands of intelligence operatives across the planet who are working to crack the encryption codes, but the extraterrestrials are using quantum-level cryptology. It is highly unlikely that humanity could crack the codes in the lifetime of our galaxy, let alone that of a human being (so it is open to debate whether our attempts to do so should be considered inspirational or grossly stupid). Anyway, a far more effective solution would be to capture a device capable of decrypting the signal. The decryption devices aboard UFOs captured to date have proved completely inert, apparently requiring an alien user. However, one of the artefacts your men recovered from the captured alien base appears to be a communications array capable of sending transmissions - so once it was set up to transmit in our laboratories, we could reverse-engineer the encryption methods in a matter of hours. We can use this knowledge to design a base structure that will decode the transmissions sent by alien vessels, giving us additional information on their composition and intent. Incidentally, the transmission that the rest of the world is so desperately working to decode is the autopsy report of an unfortunate freshwater salmon abducted and dissected by the alien forces. I think it best to keep that to ourselves. Datacores Alien Base Each Alien Base has an individual datacore much like each alien ship. These are worth varying amounts of alenium, alloys and recovery of each is worth $16,000 Reference Table Note: Expand and write up this list. *Electronics *Alloys *Anti-Gravity chamber *Armour Plating *Datacore (Every UFO contains a unique datacore) *Communication Array *Launch Tubes *Power source *Reactor *Sensor Array *Signal Decoder *Singularity Core *Alenium *Ball Navigation *Markers (Star navigation system) *Cloaking/ self repairing outer "skin"